Pedro Almodóvar’s film is a witty, sensual and moving autobiographical ode to film creativity that brought Cannes’ best actor award and an Oscar nomination to Antonio Banderas.
A great actor is not the one who cries, but the one who knows how to contain the tears, says Salvador to actor Alberto Crespo who has enthusiastically taken on a theatrical production of Salvador’s new text. The director must have served that advice to Antonio Banderas too […], but at the same time the sentence reveals the foundational credo of the film: Pain and Glory Pain and Glory isn’t weepy or in any way exaggerated; it is a sober, mature recapitulation of life, underscored with self-awareness about its own privileges and its deprivations, suggesting that, as it often is with artists, it is the deprivations that are the motor of creation. Pain and Glory is a soft film that knows how to find poetics in the most banal moments of life and masterfully contains its tears.”
– Špela Barlič (Dnevnik)
